The Counter is a weekly column from award-winning restaurant writer and broadcaster Jimi Famurewa. Sign up to get The Counter first, sent to your inbox every Tuesday.
Happy New Year, team.
St Anne’s Court, the narrow Soho artery that connects Wardour Street and Dean Street, has always struck me as one of London’s more reliably confounding dining strips. Simon Rogan’s Michelin-starred test kitchen? An enduring, vaguely Thai, things-on-rice takeaway? A vast “Danish steakhouse” within the cursed shell of a former Vodka Revolution? All of these lie a few footsteps away from each other, encapsulating the West End’s contradictory, hectically overloading character.
And now, perhaps fittingly, St Anne’s is also home to hg Soho: the very first UK outpost of a wildly popular, Spanish-born fast-casual chain (internationally known as Honest Greens) that has already taken its brand of slick health-consciousness to multiple cities in mainland Europe. Shuffling past the freshly opened unit a week before Christmas, I was so intrigued by what I saw that I genuinely stopped in my tracks. Bodies swarmed the large space’s dim-lit, golden hour glow, either to join the long ordering queue or merely to gawp in puzzled wonder. Vibey, vaguely Balearic house music drifted from unseen speakers. Lush hanging plants and woven jute lampshades, dangling above a communal space with no obvious dining tables, conjured the precise aesthetic sweet spot between the Rainforest Cafe, a Moto services and a beachside cantina in Tulum. It felt both faintly recognisable and thrillingly novel; Wagamama-level service innovation for people who have unabashedly turned being really into Hyrox and kale caesar salads into their entire personalities. I was disoriented, inexplicably entranced. More pressingly, I was desperate to come back and fully experience it for myself when I had more time.
We will come to what I thought of the food at hg Soho, but its entry to the UK market strikes me as impeccably well-timed. Not just because we are now in January – the official month of enforced abstemiousness, temporary veganism, and vague gestures towards clean-living that don’t generally survive contact with a Burns Night party invite. But also, because our fair city, like many others, is in the grip of what we might call Big Fancy Salad Mania. From Atis and The Salad Project to Farmer J and The Salad Kitchen, the past few years have seen the frenzied expansion of businesses that all offer subtle variations on the same thing: vast, highly customisable assemblies of faintly Ottolenghian components – leaves, grains, pulses, grilled meats – that promise both moreish, sustaining deliciousness and the kind of saintly, healthful glow you just don’t get from a hurriedly grabbed steak bake.
These chains, which can feel like benign cults or biohacking facilities with added green goddess dressing, have tapped into multiple post-Covid trends: optimisation, gut-conscious healthmaxxing and the kind of premium “little treat” culture that recasts a £15 salad as an act of self-care. Factor in the skip-loads of venture capital investment entering the scene (last summer, Farmer J raised £17.5 million in funding to support a planned expansion to the US) and it is hard to shake the sense that this is a lasting shift in how we all approach lunch. The studiously hydrated, gym-loving zillennials and freekeh ultras have won. Turns out, you absolutely do win friends with salad.
But hang on. If we look to America, in many ways the birthplace of modern, hyper-customisable salad bowl brands like Sweetgreen, the picture doesn’t look quite so, well, healthy. One of the prevailing narratives of last year was the dwindling fortunes – and shift towards internet mockery – of companies that specialise in takeaway bowls generously mounded with the same bland assemblage of leaves, gloopy sauces and indeterminate vegetable chunks. Recast as “slop bowls”, these sad desk lunches became endemic not just of a dining trend fallen from favour (sector giants Chipotle, Sweetgreen and Cava reportedly lost a combined £35 million in market value last year) but a broader cultural malaise that has seen Silicon Valley-approved efficiencies yield the kind of soulless, placeholder product that isn’t that far from reconfigured Huel.
“A nebulous mash of ingredients … where the selling point of the assembly line is efficiency, not craft” is how a New York Times piece described the ailing fast-casual bowl last year. And it is hard to completely argue against that reading of a dining genre that breaks ancient culinary traditions into modular, mix-and-match components of “greens”, “bases” and “proteins”. At their best, healthy bowl spots – and I am a particular fan of the generous, Asian and Caribbean-influenced to-go tubs at King Cookdaily and the plant-forward Cali fare from Palm Greens at The Sanctuary – balance vibrant abundance with personality and a degree of restraint. At their worst, they tend to focus on food’s nutritional utility, its function as an optimised heap of fuel, rather than its flavour, soul or cultural character.
So where does hg Soho fit in? Once I had made my return trip and negotiated some initial hazards (namely, the sizeable menu’s bewildering array of options and a guy with a topknot loudly conducting a work call on speaker) it had a kind of enlivening chaos. Large plates of steak and mayo-squiggled potatoes were assembled behind the counter; stressed-looking launch staff in cork board trucker caps had whispered Spanish language conversations or barked commands into headsets. And then, after barely five minutes of waiting, a server had found my wireless table tracker and ferried over a decent mass of piquant piri-piri chicken and dressed leaves that I hurriedly inhaled – hunks of griddle-kissed poultry and stomach-lining nutrients expedited into my system with the minimum fuss.
If it ends up being my best meal of the next 12 months then I will be somewhat concerned. However, it helped me understand the alluring, uncomplicated formula that is propelling brands like this to such absurd success. Slop bowl fatigue could be bound for these shores; the healthy fast-casual bubble may well be about to burst (the fact that Chipotle founder Steve Ells has just launched Counter Service, an irreverent, bowl-averse gourmet sandwich business, feels instructive). Yet January is nothing if not the time for blind optimism in the face of human fickleness and fallibility. And so hg Soho will be the latest company hoping that the Big Fancy Salad will be for life, not just for post-Christmas.
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